Marco Forti

Marco Forti is an author, researcher, and teacher of martial arts and holistic disciplines. His work brings together the study of embodied traditions, Japanese culture, and historical memory.

He has published manuals on Reiki, a study of energy treatments in early twentieth-century Japan, and translations of biographies of martial arts masters.

With The Register of Stone he turned to historical fiction, telling of the massacre at Cesena of 1377 through the themes of memory, testimony and the dignity of names saved from oblivion. The Seal of Mud, the second volume of the Chronicles of Ink and Iron, continues that inquiry in the Florence of 1378, during the tumult of the Ciompi: five voices tell of the same summer from irreconcilable positions, and the distance that separates them is the distance between those who write the papers and those who are subject to them.

In his works—diverse in form but united by a single inquiry—he explores how gestures, words, and traditions cross time and continue to speak to the present.